Karl du Fresne: New Zealand’s cultural upheaval

My wife and I recently spent two weeks on a road trip around New Zealand’s South Island. It’s a spectacularly beautiful corner of the world that was recently exposed to an international audience via Oscar-winning director Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, in which the Central Otago region stands in for the wilds of Montana.

It was a good time to be touring the island because the roads were virtually free of traffic, a state of affairs likely to come to an abrupt end now that New Zealand is reopening its doors to international tourists after two years of economically crippling isolation.

But the trip was also a therapeutic experience because in the South Island – or to give it its more poetic Maori name, Te Wai Pounamu – you’re geographically removed from Wellington and Auckland, the epicentres of the culture wars. For those two weeks it was almost possible to delude ourselves that we were back in the familiar New Zealand we knew.

Alas, it wasn’t so. Tuning in even briefly to the TV and radio news was a reminder that the country is in the grip of a cultural revolution reminiscent in tone, if not in scale, of the one that convulsed Mao’s China in the Sixties and early Seventies.

There are days when I barely recognise New Zealand as the country I was born in and where my family has lived for generations. The transformation since the re-election of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government in 2020 has been breathtaking in both its speed and its reach.